Yahoo Buys Some Time

The original date to nominate directors to the Sunnyvale, Calif., company's board was March 14th; the change puts the new deadline at 10 days following the public announcement of the date for Yahoo!'s 2008 annual meeting of stockholders, which includes Microsoft.

The date for this year's annual meeting, has not yet been determined; therefore, stockholders who want to nominate one or more directors have more time to do so. (The amendment does not preclude any party from nominating one or more directors at any time prior to the new deadline.) However, Yahoo!, which is incorporated in Delaware, must follow state law stating it must hold an annual shareholder meeting within 13 months of its previous one, which was June 12.

Combining the forces of Microsoft and Yahoo! would offer stiff competition to Google, experts have noted. An a recent Goldman Sachs Technology Investment Symposium, Chris Liddell, the CFO of Microsoft told Rick Sherland, managing director at Goldman Sachs and Co., Inc. that Microsoft recognized it had a lot of work to do on the search side, and was investing relatively aggressively.

"Ad Center [Microsoft search advertising] will give us some benefits in the long term. It's strategically important that we have control of our own destiny there, and we are investing very heavily there, even though it may have a short term earnings impact in terms of dropping our revenue for search relative to the Overture rates that we've been getting. So we will continue to do that," Sherland said. "We'll continue to build out our infrastructure, we'll continue to bridge the gap in relevancy, and we'll also continue to work on some of the new areas of search that we see coming up. We still have the view that search is very much in its infancy, so investing in the areas, some of the verticals that we are seeing, for example, around photos, investing in community questions and answers, some of the areas that we see as the potential future is something that you'll see from us as well."